Liquid City

Cappuccino with a conscience? Urth Caffe serves L.A.’s most politically correct coffee--smooth, low-acid, 100% organic blends with names like Rainforest and World Peace. It’s guilt-free coffee for the health-conscious and the liberal, coffee with a code of ethics.

“It’s not enough just to be chemical-free,” says Shallom Berkman, a Fairfax High School dropout-turned-environmentalist who owns the cafe with his wife, Jilla. “It has to be produced ethically, by environmentally conscious farms that pay fair wages and don’t use slave labor.”

The Berkmans say they buy beans from only a handful of the world’s coffee farms. “Coffee is the most heavily chemically treated food commodity in the world. It’s also one of the most valuable--traded second only to oil. But there’s not a lot of education or regulation about it.”

Besides running the buzzing earthy-hip cafe, a mail-order business and traveling the world to inspect coffee farms, Shallom Berkman spends a good deal of time trying to convert the coffee producers and drinkers of the world, a challenge he says is harder farther from Urth’s Melrose Avenue environs. “I grew up in this neighborhood--it’s the most health-conscious neighborhood in L.A.”

Urth Caffe, 8565 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood; (310) 657-4882. On the Web at https://www.urthcaffe.com.